Exploring the concept of a responsive curriculum in teacher education from the perspective of students and teacher educators

Economic, social and environmental changes place high demands on teachers and teacher education. Consequently, teacher education is challenged to design curricula that respond to and anticipate changes. Curricula are value-driven and even though part of these values might be constant, the relative importance of values and the values themselves may also be subject to change since society is changing rapidly. In vocational education, responsive curriculum development refers to balancing the needs of students, workplaces and society. Vocational education qualifies students for coping with unpredictable situations and complex problems in occupational practice. As in vocational education, teacher education also prepares students for unpredictability and complexity and thus, we adopt the concept of responsiveness from vocational education to explore teacher education. This study explores the concept of a responsive curriculum for teacher education using a qualitative approach. Interviews were conducted with the key actors, namely students and teacher educators, in the context of Dutch teacher education. An initial framework, consisting of three responsive dimensions and five designable elements, was used to guide the interviews and analyse the data. The data revealed 14 relevant themes to identify how a teacher education curriculum can be responsive to changes in society, to a variety of schools and to student diversity. The developed framework can serve as a conceptual frame to study the enactment of responsive curriculum designs. Also, it can support practitioners when designing responsive curricula.